Tag: microsoft

Apple and the argument for hybrid cloud computing

The argument between cloud computing purists and hybrid advocates continues with both sides suffering setbacks

There’s two different philosophies about cloud computing, hybrid and ‘pure’. In recent days the hybrid school hasn’t been doing so well, but the matter isn’t settled yet.

Pure cloud computing means doing everything in the cloud with all your software running over the net with the data stored on other people’s computers and everything is accessed through web browsers.

Hybrid cloud is where some of the work is done on your computer or smartphone with data often being synchronised between the device and the cloud storage.

Most smartphone and tablet computer apps do this and increasingly software like Microsoft Office and Apple iLife have a hybrid cloud computing angle.

Apple’s hybrid cloud service, iCloud, promised Apple users the ability to work on any device – laptop, desktop, tablet or smart phone – with the synchronised with central servers. Every Apple product you own can then access your iCloud data.

Recently though stories in the The Verge and Ars Technica report how Apple’s developers and customers are becoming steadily irritated by the lousy reliability of the company’s iCloud service.

Incumbent software and hardware vendors like Microsoft and Apple are pushing the hybrid idea for a good reason, it allows them to maintain their existing PC and laptop based products while being able to offer cloud services like their competitors.

For Microsoft and Apple, along with companies like Oracle, Dell and MYOB, the hybrid cloud gives them an opportunity to wriggle out of what Clay Christensen called The Innovator’s Dilemma.

Customers actually like the hybrid cloud as many distrust ‘pure’ cloud offerings as they don’t trust the providers or their internet connections. Basically they like to have a copy of their data stored in house.

The problem with the hybrid cloud is that it’s complex as Xero’s founder Rod Drury, one of the ‘pure cloud’ evangelists, said at his company’s conference last year, “hybrid technologies are cumbersome and add far more complexity into software. Cloud technologies are the right technologies.”

Complexity is what’s bought Apple’s iCloud unstuck as even some of best developers struggle with getting their programs to work with it.

All is not well for the ‘pure cloud’ evangelists either, as the shutting down of Google Reader has shaken many technologists and made them question whether the cloud is as safe as they would like.

Added to this uncertainty about the cloud is lousy service by providers, arbitrary shutting down of user accounts and the corporate boycott of Wikileaks – all of which have forced people to reconsider the wisdom of saving all their data or running applications in the cloud.

So the debate between the cloud purists is by no means over and it may well be that some form of hybrid, even just for local backup to your own computer, may turn out to be the common way we use cloud services.

What is for sure though is cloud software is biting deeply into the revenues of established software companies as people find the attractions of running programs and storing data on other people’s computers outweighs the risks.

Like all relatively new concepts it’s going to take a while for us to figure out how to use cloud computing most effectively in our business. The first step is how we manage the risks.

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The Five Stages of abandoning a product

Microsoft show us how to kill a product with the slow abandonment of Windows 8

Killing a technology product is never a clean process, as Google well know. Microsoft show the way to deal with a failed project and we’re seeing their five stages of abandoning a product as they prepare to retire Windows 8.

The stages of Microsoft are abandoning a product are well known – the failure of Microsoft Vista is the best example, but not the only one.

As Microsoft smooths Window 8’s pillow and prepares for its imminent demise we can see the process at work.

Denial

At first the company denies there is a problem, the flashy advertising campaigns are boosted and the various ‘in the camp’ commentators get informal briefings from company evangelists to fuel their snarky columns about people getting Microsoft’s latest product all wrong.

This usually goes on for around six months until the market feedback that the product is dog becomes overwhelming – usually this happens at the same time the first reliable sales figures start appearing.

Anger

As the consensus in the broader community becomes settled that the new product isn’t good, the company’s tame commentators turn nasty and lash out at the critics for ‘misrepresenting’ the new product.

This is usually a touchy period for Microsoft and other vendors as they can’t risk being too aggressive but they have to allow their allies to both let off steam and try to recover the credibility they lost in hyping what’s clearly been a market failure.

Bargaining

Once it’s clear the perceived wisdom that the product isn’t very good isn’t going to be shaken, the vendor comes out with special offers and pricing changes to try and coax users over to the new service.

With Windows 8 Microsoft tried something unusual, rather than cutting prices, Microsoft announced they would increase the cost of Windows 8.

The idea was probably to panic people into buying the product and giving Microsoft a revenue and market share bounce for the quarter.

It didn’t work – the consensus that Windows 7 is a better product meant people stayed away.

Depression

As the realisation that pricing tweaks and promotional stunts won’t work sends the company, and its supporters, into a funk.

For experienced industry watchers, the silence around a product that’s been heavily hyped and defended for the previous year or two is a good indication that the next version is being accelerated.

Acceptance

Eventually the vendor accepts the product has failed and starts working on its own exit strategy – hopefully one that doesn’t see too many executives sacked.

With Microsoft’s this process starts with a quiet announcement that the replacement version of Windows is on the way, in this case Windows Blue.

At the same time, the tame commentators start talking about ‘leaks’ of the wonderful new system that is in the pipeline. Early beta versions of the new product start popping up in developers’ forums and file sharing sites.

Eventually you get stories like this one that appeared in The Verge yesterday – Windows Blue leaks online and we can be sure the Microsoft public relations machine has subtly moved onto the next version.

Vale Windows 8

So Windows 8 is coming to an early end. In one way this is a shame as it was a brave gamble by Steve Ballmer and his team to solve the ‘three screen’ problem.

Computer users today are using three or more screens or devices – a desktop, a smartphone and a TV or tablet computer.

Microsoft were hoping they could develop a system that unified all these platforms and gave users a common experience regardless of what they were using.

It appears to have failed, probably because the different devices don’t have the same user experience so a keyboard based system doesn’t work on a touchscreen while a touch based system sucks really badly on a desktop or laptop computer – which is Windows 8’s real problem.

Unrealistic expectations

Another problem for Microsoft were the unrealistic expectations that Window 8 would halt the slide of personal computer sales.

PC manufacturers have been baffled by the rise of smartphones and tablet computers – vendors like Dell, HP and Acer have miserably in moving into the new product lines and they hoped that Microsoft could help arrest their market declines.

This was asking too much of Windows 8 and was never really likely.

So the cycle begins again with Windows Blue, the question is whether it will be the last version of Windows as we move further in the post-PC era.

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Microsoft’s China crisis

Microsoft’s Chinese partner is blocking Skype messages and possibly passing user details onto PRC authorities. This security concern could damage both Microsoft and Skype.

That the Chinese Public Security Bureau is blocking your messages – and may even be reading them – would make anyone pause before they used a service.

Bloomberg Businessweek reports Microsoft Skype is doing exactly this with its Chinese customers. Anything deemed inappropriate is censored and referred to servers belonging to TOM Online, the company that runs the Skype service on behalf on Microsoft in China.

The Bloomberg story goes onto detail how one Canadian researcher is reverse engineering the Chinese blacklists, giving us a wonderful insight into the petty and touchy minds of China’s censors and political leaders.

What raises eyebrows about this story is how nonchalant Microsoft is about this issue, in a wonderful piece of corporate speak the software giant answered Bloomberg’s question with the following bland statement;

“Skype’s mission is to break down barriers to communications and enable conversations worldwide,” the statement said. “Skype is committed to continued improvement of end user transparency wherever our software is used.”

Microsoft’s statement also said that “in China, the Skype software is made available through a joint venture with TOM Online. As majority partner in the joint venture, TOM has established procedures to meet its obligations under local laws.”

Microsoft have to fix this problem quickly, glibly saying the Chinese government eavesdropping on conversations is a matter for partners is not going to be accepted by most customers.

It would be a shame should Microsoft’s Skype investment fail – Skype is a very good fit for Microsoft, particularly when the technology is coupled with the Linc corporate messaging platform, so squandering goodwill over protecting users’ conversation seems counterproductive.

One of the great business issues of this decade is the battle to protect users’ privacy. Those who don’t do this, or don’t understand the imperatives of doing so, are going to lose the trust of the marketplace.

Twenty years ago, Microsoft could have risked this. Today they can’t as they struggle with a poor response to their Windows 8 operating system and their mobile phone product.

Losing the trust of their customers may be the final straw.

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People like us – could poor hiring practices bring down Silicon Valley?

Are poor hiring practices putting Silicon Valley at risk?

A strange little story appeared in Business Insider a few weeks back, 9 Things Your Resume Needs if you want to be Hired by Apple or Google is a curious view into the mindset of Silicon Valley.

Purporting to be an extract from a book written by a former recruiter who claims to have worked for Apple, Google and Microsoft, the story exposes a weakness in Silicon Valley and the technological elite which may cause the very disruptions they have unleashed to work against them.

The nine items are fascinating for the elitist, US-centric view of the world they portray and each is worth investigating on their own.

If you graduated from an elite college, your chances of getting an interview vastly improve

Yes, where you went to school does matter to the tech giants. Of course there are exceptions, but McDowell says an Ivy League or other top university will get you noticed.

There’s not much more to add to this, except to note that the vast majority of students whose families can afford such an education are from the upper middle class.

The Googles and Apples like to see relevant internship experience.

If you waited tables when you were 19, that isn’t attractive.

If you are lucky enough to get into a an Ivy League school on a scholarship or manage to scrape together the money you may still not make the cut.

To the author, only those with sufficient wealth to participate in unpaid internships are going to get jobs at the top Silicon Valley companies.

Your major matters

Sorry liberal arts people or chemical engineers, you’ll need another way in to Google or Apple.

This is an interesting one, Silicon Valley boosters often talk about the creative process and how coders are artists however according to the recruiter that’s just lip service.

She encourages students to pick majors that are directly relevant to Google or Apple. Finance, accounting, marketing or computer science majors have the best shot of being noticed by a tech recruiter.  At the very least, minor in one of those fields.

A focus on finance, accounting and marketing is the same as any old corporation – you could be going for a job with AT&T, Goldman Sachs or the government with qualifications like that. So much for unique.

Dissing chemical engineering is particularly interesting as Chem Eng graduates have passed one of the toughest university degrees. Whats more, the demands of mobile computing devices means battery technology is one of the most pressing issues facing Silicon Valley at the moment. Chemical Engineers are the folk who will solve this problem.

Big tech companies like to see people giving back to their communities.

Volunteering can be a great way to buff up your resume. That said, McDowell warns: “don’t serve soup in a soup kitchen.”

Instead she suggests hunting for a sales or marketing position, or offering to help a charity with its website and design.

This is a really obnoxious statement – basically saying we want to you volunteer, but we don’t want you to help people.

Just how many sales and marketing people are needed by soup kitchens, volunteer fire brigades or community pantries is open to debate.

A bigger issue with this mentality is that it favours bureaucrats and paper shufflers rather than doers. Which again is something anathema to the public statements of Silicon Valley’s leaders.

They also like good spellers and speakers.

Writing and communications skills aren’t just necessary for media jobs. They’re important in any career you’ll have.

Well, duh.

If you are buddies with college professors, that’s a plus.

Professors aren’t just impressed by how you do in their classes.  McDowell suggests helping them with research projects, asking for help and attending office hours, or becoming a teaching assistant.

That doesn’t hurt, but it’s pretty basic vanilla advice and again it’s tough luck if you have to do a shift at the local fast food restaurant so you can feed yourself.

Show you understand multiple positions at Google or Apple

If you want to work at one of the top tech companies, it helps to have at least a basic understanding of multiple positions in the organization.  McDowell calls this being a Generalist.

On one hand this advice makes sense but on another many technical roles are not generalist positions.

Generally having a knowledge of the company’s structure and roles is going to look good to any interviewer, assuming you can get past the gatekeeper at the recruitment company.

Entrepreneurs have a better shot of being hired.

This is a funny one, if you’re a real entrepreneur then the thought of working in cubicle at Apple or Microsoft while answering to a middle manager straight out of a Dilbert cartoon ranks with getting hot pine needles thrust under  your toenails.
One of the conceits of modern corporate life is that they value entrepreneurs and the free-wheeling spirits – the truth is they don’t and the first true hint of entrepreneurialism among the ranks will be smothered quickly with a deluge of paperwork.
Funnily enough, being a successful tech entrepreneur is a path to getting a good job at a tech company although it’s more likely to happen as an acqui-hire than through a recruiter.

Good news: Your GPA doesn’t matter very much

Most people think tech companies, Google in particular, harp over candidates’ GPAs. McDowell says there is little truth to that rumor.

This is only good news if you’ve ticked most of the other boxes, which means you’ll be considered if you’re middling graduate from Stanford or Harvard but forget it if you went elsewhere, regardless of how good your marks are.

The danger of recruiters

What the Business Insider story really illustrates are the risks of relying on third party recruiters as gatekeepers to filter out new employees.

Regardless of how good the recruitment consultant is they are going to apply their own cultural filters and biases onto the selection process and as a result knock out most good candidates.

More importantly, a company risks developing a monoculture if the recruitment process is too effective at filtering out people who don’t fit a narrow stereotype.

A new breed of officemen?

Reading the Business Insider story leaves one with the feeling that many of these companies are beginning to look like IBM in the 1960s – monocultures more concerned about the colour of an employee’s tie and choice of shirts rather than the talents they bring to the organisation or the value they can add to customers.

This is probably the greatest risk of all to the tech industry, that they end up with an insular group of people with fixed mindsets.

Should that happen, then the wave of disruption Silicon Valley has unleashed on the world will end up being the industry’s undoing as smart kids working out of garages in Michigan or slums in Delhi will out innovate the staid, comfortable incumbents.

It’s also interesting to consider how many other industries are now suffering after several decades of similar recruiting practices where leading businesses are now dominated by insular, unworldly monocultures.

Image courtesy of Alexfurr on SXC.HU

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On being evil

Microsoft learn what its like to be the weakest kid on the block while Google consider a future of being evil.

“Don’t be evil” are the opening words of Google’s corporate code.

When it was framed in the late 1990s there was one company in particular everyone in the tech industry thought of when the word ‘evil’ was being used.

At the time Microsoft defined evil in the technology industry. The main reason was their crushing of real or potential competitors like Netscape, Java or the troubled IBM joint venture of OS/2.

Topping everything though was Microsoft’s tactic of fake error messages designed to scare customers away from the competing DR-DOS system in the early 1990s.

So it’s rather delicious that Microsoft seems to be getting a taste of its own medicine twenty years later as Google Maps returns an error message on Windows Phones.

This is particularly galling for Microsoft as Windows Phone is essential for the company’s resurgence and, as Apple have learned, maps are a critical feature for smart phone users.

It’s too early to accuse Google of having become evil as Microsoft did during their period of dominance as Tim Wu discusses in Why Does Everyone Think Google Beat The FTC but the search giant is flexing its muscles on many fronts.

For Microsoft, they are learning what life’s like when you’re not the toughest, meanest kid on the block.

Karma can be a real bitch.

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Was the netbook the Trabant or Model T of the computer world?

After only five years the netbook computer comes to an end having being killed by tablet computers and vendor hostility. We will remember these systems as the Model T or Trabant of the PC world?

Taiwanese technology website Digitimes reports Asustek have shipped their last eeePC netbooks, bringing to an end a product that promised to change the computing world when they were first released in 2007.

At the time the eeePC netbook picked up on a number of trends – cheap hardware, the maturity of the open source Linux operating system, affordable wireless access and, most importantly, the accessibility of cloud computing services.

There’d been a pent up demand for usable portable computers for years but Microsoft and their hardware partners consistently released clunky, overpriced tablet computers that simply didn’t deliver on their promises.

For users wanting a cheap, fairly robust portable computer then netbooks were a good choice, at the price you could even risk having one eaten by lions.

into the lions den with an Asus eeePC netbook

Unfortunately for netbook a few things went against the idea.

Customers don’t like Linux

An early blow to the eeePC was that retail users don’t like Linux. Most computer users are happy with Windows and MacOS and weaning them off what they know is a very hard sell.

Sadly on this topic I have first hand knowledge having suffered the pain of co-founding a business in the mid 2000s that tried to sell Linux to small businesses.

Asustek discovered this when they found customers preferred the more expensive Windows XP version over the original Linux equipped devices.

Unfortunately Microsoft’s licenses damaged the economics of the netbook and held the manufacturers hostage to Microsoft who, at the time, wasn’t particularly inclined to encourage customers to use cloud services.

Manufacturer resistance

Microsoft weren’t the only supplier unhappy with netbooks. Harry McCracken at Time Tech describes how chip supplier Intel worked against the products.

For manufacturers, the netbooks were bad news as they crushed margins in an industry already struggling with tiny profits. However all of them couldn’t ignore the sales volumes and released their own netbooks which cannabilised their own low end laptop and desktop ranges.

In turn this irritated the army of PC resellers who found their commissions and margins were falling due to the lower ticket prices of netbooks.

The rise of the tablet

The one computer manufacturer who stayed aloof from the rush into low margin netbooks was Apple who had no reason to rush down the commodity computing rabbit hole. It was Steve Jobs who launched the product that made netbooks irrelevant.

“Netbooks aren’t better at anything… they are just cheaper, they are just cheap laptops” Jobs said at the iPad launch in January 2010.

Immediately the iPad redefined the computer market; those who’d been waiting a decade for a decent tablet computer scooped the devices up.

Executives who wouldn’t have dreamt of replacing their Blackberries with an iPhone, let alone using an Apple computer proudly showed off their shiny iPads.

The arrival of the iPad in boardrooms and executive suites also had the side effect of kick starting the Bring Your Own Device movement as CIOs and IT managers found that their policy of Just Say No was a career limiting move when the Managing Director wanted to connect her iPad to the corporate network.

Rebuilding PC margins

Around the time of the iPad’s released the major PC manufacturers declared a detente over netbooks and joined Intel in developing the Ultrabook specification.

Intel designed the Ultrabook portable computer specification

The aim of the Ultrabook was to de-commodify the PC laptop market by offering higher quality machines with better margins.

While the Ultrabook has worked to a point, competition from tablet computers and the demands of consumers who’ve been trained to look for sub $500 portables means the more expensive systems are gradually coming down to the netbook’s price points.

Today’s Ultrabook will be next month’s netbook.

For the PC manufacturers, the lesson is that computers have been a commodity item for nearly a decade and only savvy marketing and product development – both of which have been Apple’s strengths – is the only way for long term success in the marketplace.

Those US based manufacturers who haven’t figured this out are only go to find that Chinese manufacturers – led by companies like Taiwan’s Asustek – will increasingly take the bottom end of the market from them.

The car industry is a good comparison to personal computers in commoditisation – with the passing of the netbook, the question is whether we’ll remember the eeePC  as a Trabant, Model T Ford or a Volkswagen Beatle.

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Is Facebook the new Microsoft?

Are the internet giants – Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon following the same path as Microsoft did in the 1990s?

One of the problems with dominating your field is that to find new growth opportunities involves becoming distracted with your core business and damaging your reputation. This is what hurt Microsoft over the last decade and now threatens the internet’s big four.

App.net CEO Dalton Caldwell wrote an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg describing how the social media giant is trying to wipe out competitors through bullying them into being acquired.

If a business doesn’t succumb to Facebook’s seduction, then they risk being wiped out by the social media giant setting up their own version of the product which they can push out to a billion subscribers.

Jason Calacanis explores this strategy with Facebook’s launch of Poke, designed to compete with the instant messaging service Snapchat.

In many ways this is the same model that Microsoft employed in the 1990s as it worked towards dominating the desktop computer market – bully innovators into selling to them and, if that fails, copy the product and crush the opposition.

It worked for Microsoft because they controlled the distribution channels through their tight relationships with computer manufacturers.

Microsoft created their own applications, or features in their products, which would be bundled onto Dell, Gateway or Compaq computers. Once users had functionality built into Windows or Microsoft Office then they didn’t have to buy a third party app.

Bundling network protocols destroyed the business models of LANtastic and Novell, in the browser wars Microsoft killed Netscape by putting Internet Explorer on the desktop and in the office suite predatory pricing killed WordPerfect and Lotus while resulting in acquisitions of companies like Visio.

This way of business cemented Microsoft’s domination of their desktop, office productivity and server markets at the turn of the century. It was a true river of gold that continues to flow today.

Unlike the personal computer software markets, bullying or buying your way into market dominance doesn’t work online as the barriers to entry that protected Microsoft from competitors are nonexistent on the web.

Both AOL and Yahoo! learned this the hard way as their acquisition sprees through the dot com boom didn’t prevent them from sliding into irrelevance.

A good example of how hard it is for the Internet giants to execute a plan for world domination is the rise and fall of Google’s Knol as described by Seth Godin, who thought his own Squidoo startup would be crushed by the Internet giant. It turned out not to be so.

For the web incumbents the fundamental problem are, as Jason says, that they are not focusing on their core businesses and they have plenty of Plan Bs as Seth Godin described.

The manager who fails with Knol or Poke moves onto another division with a pat on the back and a safe claim on their bonus. The startup founders on the other hand are fighting for survival.

All four of the Internet’s giants have similarities to Microsoft in the 1990s as every single one dominates its niche and wonders how to expand outside their core business – for Google, and possibly the other three, there’s the added problem of managerialism as a large cadre of managers worries more about maintaining privileges over competing in the marketplace.

Managerialism ended up crippling Microsoft and continues to do so today, whether Facebook and Google can avoid that fate remains to be seen.

A bigger problem for Facebook is losing trust – Microsoft’s conduct, particularly with WordPerfect and Netscape in the late 1990s made a generation of developers and entrepreneurs cautious about dealing with the company.

For many that suspicion remains and is one of the barriers the company now has to overcome in the smartphone and cloud computing markets where it is one of the crowd of scrappy challengers.

In the social and online worlds, collaboration is one of the keys to success. If Facebook, or any of the others, lose the trust of the community then they’ll become irrelevant a lot faster than WordPerfect or LANtastic did.

Becoming irrelevant is the real worry for Facebook’s tenured managers and their investors.

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